20VC: James Cameron @ Accel on Building Great Startup Communities and The Rise of Enterprise and Cyber Security Software

James Cameron is an early stage investor at Accel where he focuses on enterprise software, security, fintech and marketplace businesses. Prior to joining Accel, he founded and ran BipSync, a SaaS-based research platform for investment management. James also spent time on the tech banking team at Morgan Stanley and as a corporate lawyer at Freshfields Bruckhaus Deringer in London, Shanghai and Hong Kong. A special thank you to Mattermark for providing all the data displayed in today's show and you can find out more about Mattermark here! In Today's Episode You Will Learn: 1.) How James made his way into the world of startups and investing? 2.) How does James go about finding the needles in the haystack in the sea of amazing startups? Do James use data to find great companies? Do you think this will be a continuing trend, in terms of algorithmic deal sourcing? 3.) What cool stuff has James been seeing in the enterprise software and security sector? Does James think there are any underhyped or overhyped segments of these markets? 4.) One very dominant eco system for tech in general but specifically security is Israel, how do the UK and Israeli ecosystems differ? Is there anything we can do in the UK to harness the spirit encapsulated by the Israeli ecosystem? 5.) What are the catalysts or drivers of these communities’ growth? Do you agree with Marc Andreesen in saying we shouldn't think about building "The Silicon Valley of X" because the components that make up SV aren't repeatable and areas should instead specialize on specific verticals, like bitcoin or security. What do you think about that concept? Items Mentioned In Today's Episode: James' Fave Book: Crossing The Chasm James' Fave Blog or Newsletter: Adrian Colyer: The Morning Paper James' Most Recent Investment: Doctolib As always you can follow The Twenty Minute VC, Harry and James on Twitter here! If you would like to see a more colourful side to Harry with many a mojito session, you can follow him on Instagram here!

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Harry Stebbings?

  Hello and welcome back to the 20 Minute VC with your host, Harry Stebbings. And following our episode with the awesome Fred Destin, we are back in the land of Excel. And joining me today in the hot seat is James Cameron, early-stage investor at Excel, where he focuses on enterprise software, security, fintech and marketplace businesses. And prior to joining Excel, James founded and ran BIP Sync, a SaaS-based research platform for investment management. James also spent time on the tech banking team at Morgan Stanley and as a corporate lawyer at Freshfields in London, Shanghai and Hong Kong. But before we dive into the show today, I have two thank yous to make. Firstly, I'd like to thank the entire Excel team in London for being so fantastic with the show.

• 0:45Harry Stebbings?

  Sunali, Michael, Luciana, an absolute pleasure to meet you and a huge thank you for making the 20 Minute VC so welcome in Excel's offices. And then a huge thank you to Matamark for providing all the data and analysis for today's show. Anyone looking for more startup and VC reading material, check out the amazing Matamark Daily by Nick Frost, who can be found at @thinker on Twitter, for all the best startup and VC articles. However, it is now time to dive into the show today, therefore I'm delighted to welcome James Cameron at Excel.

• 1:22Speaker 01

  You have now arrived at your destination.

• 1:25Harry Stebbings?

  James, absolutely fantastic to have you on the show for the second installment of Axel's feature week. Thank you so much for joining us. I said joining us, I'm actually joining you in Axel's office, but thank you for having me.

• 1:36Speaker 02

  No worries, it's great to be here. Thanks, Harry.

• 1:38Harry Stebbings?

  Now, I'd love to kick off by hearing how you made your way into the wonderful world of VC.

• 1:45Speaker 02

  Well, I guess, you know, I know most people come on your show and they sort of talk about how they had this random walk and they sort of fell into VC. I guess I'm no real difference to that. You know, I started off in Australia, I'm an Aussie originally. Growing up in Australia, when you feel like you're 10,000 miles away from everything, that you really want to get out and see what's going on in the rest of the world. So I came across to London originally and my first job out of undergrad was at actually a big law firm, working for a bunch of tech companies. We were doing IP law and M&A for companies like Party Gaming and Betfair, some of these big sort of UK tech companies in the last generation. But I realised it pretty quickly that the law wasn't for me, so I went off and tried some other things. I did tech banking for a while.

• 2:31Speaker 02

  And then I took myself off to the valley for a few years and I spent a couple of years at Stanford at the business school there and then started a company out in the valley. It was a company called BipSync and it's a company selling research management software into hedge funds and mutual funds and that sort of thing. It's still going now, still being run by an old business school buddy of mine. But oddly enough, the first interaction I had with Accel was when I went in there and I was pitching in my business. So I was on the other side of the table from where I am now. And it was a good experience, you know, I was politely showing the door. I said, "Thanks very much for coming, but it's not a fit." But I got to know the guys pretty well and through that, and I was living in Palo Alto at the time, and through that, when I decided to move back to Europe, they introduced me

• 3:15Speaker 02

  to the team here. And the team here was looking for someone to come and look at enterprise software companies and B two B companies here. And so suggested that I come and see what it's like to be on this side of the table as a change.

• 3:27Harry Stebbings?

  So you went for investment and got a job?

• 3:29Speaker 02

  Yeah, pretty much, yeah, yeah. Asked for some money and wound up with a different type of job at the end.

• 3:34Harry Stebbings?

  Well, I'd love to get the ball rolling then with a question from previous guest from Monday's episode, Fred and your colleague. So Fred wants to know, how do you go about finding the needles in the haystack that is the brilliant startups?

• 3:48Speaker 02

  Yeah, I'm not surprised Fred's asked that one. We spend a lot of time here internally talking about exactly how we're gonna sort of optimise exactly that, like how do we find these needles? And, you know, it's a big haystack, right? London, Accel London, we look at anything from the UK to Russia to Israel. We spend time, we seem to spend time in Australia, in New Zealand even. We did our first Kiwi investment this year, a company called Zero. So it's a big geographical area that we cover.

• 4:15Harry Stebbings?

  Zero with an X?

• 4:17Speaker 02

  Yeah, yeah, yeah, accounting software company, exactly, great company. So we spend, you know, we spend a tonne of time on point. We're all over the place. And so when I think about sort of the ways that we use to try and find the needles in that haystack, I sort of think about it in sort of two buckets. There's the, there's a methodical sort of premeditated approach and then there's the more opportunistic approach. I think in that first bucket, that's really where we sit down, sort of try and think about a market or a space or a theme that we really like. Um, we call it our sort of prepared mind initiative and, you know, that's a kind of goofy term, but I think it comes from the, the, the famous Pasteur quotes. Uh, fortune favors the prepared mind.

• 4:59Harry Stebbings?

  Mm-hmm.

• 5:00Speaker 02

  Um, but, you know, we, we try and identify these areas and we try and get to know everyone we can who knows anything about these areas, really sort of get to know inside out. We go to all the conferences, we hold our own conferences, really try and understand it inside out and then, you know, that helps us be able to identify what we really like to see in a great company. Uh, I'll give you an example about, probably about this time last year, we were getting really excited about the API economy. You know, we were seeing software, uh, being eaten by, by APIs effectively. Um, you know, you'd see APIs becoming as ubiquitous as, as we- websites. Uh, the API calls being as common as, uh, being the new sort of web hits.

• 5:38Speaker 02

  And then you see these other companies, these big companies like Uber and, uh, Hotel Tonight and Instacart that are all being built on top of other people's services, all being connected up via APIs. Um, so, you know, we got really excited about this trend and, and, you know, we, we started to really get to under the covers and we had a big conference out in the States. We call it the APX conference where we got all our portfolio companies that were, uh, interested in that sort of thing out to talk about it. And through that, you know, we got to know a lot of great companies, uh, both in the US and here and, and, and we wound up making some great investments. So there's, there's Algolia, a, a French company that's doing.

• 6:11Harry Stebbings?

  Jason Larkin.

• 6:12Speaker 02

  Exactly.

• 6:12Harry Stebbings?

  Yeah, I know, I just spoke to Jason actually.

• 6:14Speaker 02

  Right, right, right. Yeah, I mean, that's, it's a great example, right? This is a enterprise search as a service all delivered via API and developers love it. Um, Carto DB in Spain, one of our most recent investments is another sort of example, it's, you know, a mapping company, uh, that's all delivered via API. It's, it's a, it's a great, uh, example. And then there's this sort of other bucket, which is the, you know, the more opportunistic approach, you know, and that's, you know, we spend a lot of time thinking about how we can maximize our ability of being in the right time at the right place. And that's really comes down to a lot of things, you know, it's, it's very relational dri- relationship driven. Uh, it's about being, you know, very close to our founders and getting warm intros through them. Uh, it's about being very close to other investors, you know, particularly angels and, and regional VCs that we work very close with.

• 6:59Speaker 02

  Um, it's about meeting companies very, very early, perhaps even earlier than that, even thinking about taking on VC money. So we can build a relationship with them. It's about making ourselves as open and as approachable as we can, you know, sort of spending a lot of time doing office hours at, at some of the incubators and, and, uh, holding events there, et cetera.

• 7:16Harry Stebbings?

  How long do you like to know your founders before making an investment for you?

• 7:20Speaker 02

  Uh, I mean, there's, there's always, there's always the occasional ones that come out of the, uh, the blue that we have never met before and, you know, we, we, we can do a, a deal in a couple of weeks. Um, but I think overall, we probably know our founders for, you know, upwards of twelve months sometimes before we, uh, before we make an investment. It's, it's, it's important, you know, they get the chance to get to know us very well and we get the chance to know them very well. Uh, we see how things evolve over time, you know, we know very well that the net is never a straight line. It's always sort of moves in a big squiggle and there's always ups and downs and seeing how to see how a founder, um, operates over both the, the good times and the bad times in that period is fantastic for us to get to know how they're gonna, uh, uh, operate, uh, when we make an investment.

• 8:01Harry Stebbings?

  And you mentioned incubators there. How effective do you see them as, uh, methods to deal, flow and deal sourcing?

• 8:08Speaker 02

  Yeah, I mean, it's, it's, it's, it's great for us because it gives us a way to, uh, connect with, uh, a, a, a large number of companies very quickly. And so, uh, uh, you know, there's some incubators out there right across Europe, uh, that are really sort of showing, showing themselves as being fantastic feeders into not just angel investments, but, um, a series A and beyond. You know, guys Seedcamp, guys like, um, Wantamun at First, uh, here in London. Um, and even sort of in the emerging areas in Spain, guys like Plug and Play and Seedrocker, there's some fantastic sort of places that are really setting themselves out from the pack. Um, and, uh, we think it's a great way for us to get, uh, a great deal sourcing.

• 8:47Harry Stebbings?

  And I'd love to discuss one of your main focuses now, the enterprise software and security scene a little. So what cool stuff have you been seeing recently? Uh, and what kind of leads you to think that something is cool or exciting?

• 9:01Speaker 02

  Yeah, well, I mean, we, I spend a lot of time in enterprise a bit a bit, that's where, that's where I spend most of my time actually. And, you know, we already talked about APIs and there's a huge amount to run still on that. I spend a lot of time looking at IT infrastructure, uh, and I think we're seeing some really cool stuff there and around the sort of the Docker and container ecosystem. Um, so, you know, in the last eighteen months, we've seen this huge shift for developers who would traditionally build their applications on, you know, a traditional sort of, uh, virtualized machine. We're now choosing to to build on these much more lightweight and flexible containers. As the as a shelter on their applications there. And this this, you know, we're firmly convinced this is one of those rare sort of developments in I T infrastructure, there's sort of a generational shift.

• 9:41Speaker 02

  Which has huge repercussions. I mean, this is similar to what we saw when sort of mainframes went to client server or the advent of cloud computing. You have these huge shifts, platform shifts, where there's a lot of potentially very valuable companies that are coming up in the ecosystem to sort of support this big platform shift. And that's really been the the main driver between some of our investments lately here in the U K like Cluster H Q and and Weave Works, which are very exciting. And then then then I spent also spent a lot of time on the security space, which I think is is super exciting at the moment. These is, you know, this is an area that is on the top of everybody's lips. There's we see these high profile and very expensive breaches all the time, the Sonys, the Targets, the Talk Talks of the world.

• 10:24Speaker 02

  And, you know, those aren't the things we just read about on TechCrunch, this is hitting mainstream press. There's not a there's not a boardroom at a public company in the country that's not absolutely terrified of this stuff happening to them. And so we're seeing huge amounts of budgets being shifted into into cybersecurity vendors. And we're also seeing a ton of innovation, you know, I spent a lot of time looking at companies here in the U K in this area and also in Israel. And we're seeing some some great trends happening there. You're seeing some of these big incumbent guys like your your your fire. Your your firewalls and your malware protection vendors who are being attacked at all sites from. So the new entrants who are taking a sort of a next gen approach to it, either they're cloud deployed or they're using.

• 11:06Speaker 02

  Big data with machine learning on top to to figure out sort of behavioral profiles of attacks that the other platforms simply can't see. Which, and you know, that's driven a lot of our investments, so comes like CrowdStrike in the U S. Ayrato, which is an Israeli company we invested in last year. And then on the other side, you're seeing again these platform shifts. So you're seeing the shift to mobile, the shift to cloud, the shift to containers. Which is, you know, the classic security lifecycle is always, you know, infrastructure shifts into a new platform. Attackers find vulnerabilities in that platform and then the security community has to come and sort of remediate and solve those problems. So we're constantly seeing an evolution of new companies in cloud security and mobile security, et cetera, and tons more in those platforms to come.

• 11:49Harry Stebbings?

  And do you think within the vertical there are any particularly underhyped or overhyped segments that you've seen in the last couple of years?

• 11:56Speaker 02

  Yeah, I mean, you know, I think you ask a lot of people and they'll tell you sort of big data and analytics is the most overused buzzword in.

• 12:02Harry Stebbings?

  Big data is very popular, isn't it?

• 12:05Speaker 02

  Yeah, and I know, I think that, I think there's good arguments behind that. I think you see these big horizontal use cases of big data that are trying to do things faster and with more volume, et cetera. And, you know, there's a lot of players going after that space. But I think what's an underhyped area in the same, in the same general ballpark is sort of these vertical specific applications of analytics. You know, we've been investing in the, in the building blocks for this sort of stuff, the MongoDB's and the Couchbase and the Cloudarrows for years. Um, but there's these huge verticals like manufacturing, construction and healthcare and insurance that are still reasonably unpenetrated when it comes to the next-gen analytics. And these are the sort of guys that don't care if you're, you know, you're using Hadoop or Spark or whatever under the covers. They just want

• 12:47Speaker 02

  a platform that's going to give them great insights, uh, in a way that means they don't have to go off and hire a bunch of data scientists. It's this sort of last mile of analytics. And I think there's a ton of sort of very vertical specific areas that you can make a ton of money in these companies.

• 13:01Harry Stebbings?

  And we've mentioned Israel a few times, um, particularly with the security space. So how does the UK and Israel in terms of ecosystems differ? You've spent quite a lot of time in Israel.

• 13:12Speaker 02

  Yeah, I I we do, we do. I I think after the US and the the UK is probably one of the next biggest areas of activity for us. We've been investing there for sort of, you know, fifteen, twenty years. And it's pretty amazing when you think about it. You've got this country that's got, what, like, eight million people? And it's got more NASDAQ-listed companies than all of Europe, plus China, plus Japan combined. The VC per capita there is is higher than just about anywhere in the world. It's really pretty incredible. And a lot of, you know, a lot of this, of course, is cybersecurity. That's the natural inclination. But there's also a lot of stuff in software and storage and infrastructure. And a lot of it, a lot of it is structural, right? You get a, you know, there's two to three years compulsory military service for eighteen-year-olds in Israel.

• 13:57Speaker 02

  And the largest Well, the largest, the largest unit in the Israeli Defense Forces is is the, it's called the eighty-two-hundred unit. Uh, which is effectively, this, the, it's the same as GCHQ or NSA. It's a cybersecurity intelligence unit. Um, so it's, it's, it's the equivalent of sending, you know, thirty percent of the eighteen-year-olds in Britain off to GCHQ for three years to to get trained in how to combat cybersecurity threats. And so, so you get these companies that are coming out of the the Defense Forces and and uh, starting companies, startups, and really just commercializing some of the learnings that they've learnt in in in the army. Um, and they, and they do fantastic things. But also, you know, it's, the other thing is you've got

• 14:40Speaker 02

  a country of eight million people, you realise pretty quickly that you can't build a very big business selling to your local market. So you're thinking globally from day one. Um, and, uh, you know, the classic Israeli model is keep your R and D base all in Israel and then, you know, even pre-Series A, sometimes pre-CED, move your CEO out to the valley or or on the east coast and build out the go-to-market team there. Um, we're seeing more and more of that in Europe and other places that are sort of using that model.

• 15:09Harry Stebbings?

  Do you think the global outlook from the start is is kind of crucial to their success?

• 15:13Speaker 02

  Yeah, yeah, I think it's, I think it's a fundamental piece of it. I mean, ultimately, if you're building an enterprise software business today, you know, you you want to become a global leader, it means becoming a leader in the US. And and a lot of that will follow from that. Uh, so having that outlook and and and focusing there from the beginning, I think is incredibly important. But you know, the UK, UK is a bit different. I mean, we're, you know, we've got some great successes in cybersecurity here in UK. So far, listed this year, it was the biggest ever UK software company listing. And then there's this sort of other, there's this group of new entrants that are coming through with great momentum, like Darktrace and Digital Shadows. And these guys, you know, there's, there's, so it's a new wave, but ultimately, we don't really

• 15:56Speaker 02

  have the critical mass that you see in the valley or Israel or even Washington.

• 16:01Harry Stebbings?

  Is there anything we can do to kind of harness their energy and their ecosystem and try and improve the UK? It's not that it needs matting, it does need improving in a sense, but what would you suggest?

• 16:13Speaker 02

  Well, I mean, yeah, it's pretty, it's pretty tough to bring in conscription and get everyone to do three years at GCHQ, so I'm not suggesting that.

• 16:19Harry Stebbings?

  I think I'm within that age range to suggest that either.

• 16:22Speaker 02

  But I think, you know, the, the government here has made no secret of the fact that it wants to build a cybersecurity hub in the same way that UK is, is a fintech hub. And I think there was just last week, they announced they want to spend, you know, a hundred and sixty million pounds on cybersecurity startups. You know, and I think that's great. There's also, you know, we're seeing a lot of these innovation hubs like Cylon, the incubator that my friend Alex Amadeus is, is building. As great ways to be focal points for that cybersecurity ecosystem.

• 16:55Speaker 02

  But, you know, I think it's important for, you know, there's a massive talent shortage, not just in the UK, but everywhere really, when it comes to this sort of stuff. And it's not the sort of stuff that you can just learn in a textbook. You know, you have to see what the threats are to, to, to understand how to solve them. And that really sort of is, is important to have these startups getting access to places like GCHQ and big companies so they can see what the threats are and then go off and, and really build companies around how to solve them.

• 17:21Harry Stebbings?

  And talking in kind of hubs of innovation and technology, we've also seen huge amounts of growth in the Spanish startup ecosystem. So what do you think the catalysts or main drivers are to a community, maybe not the Spanish, but a community growing exponentially in our vertical?

• 17:38Speaker 02

  Yeah, it's uh it's it's funny, you know, that's one of the been the big, one of the biggest revelations for me since joining ourselves. You know, we always used to talk about these primary tech hubs in in Europe, you know, your Stockholmes, your Londons, your Berlins. And then, but what's been, what's been fantastic and really exciting is seeing these, what we used to, you know, think of as the secondary clusters. Uh really coming into their own, places like Ireland and and Denmark and Portugal and and Spain. Spain's a great example, you know, we're really excited about what we're seeing down there now. I think if you go back eighteen months, we had one Spanish investment, um a company called Peer Transfer, uh now Flywire. Uh and uh fast forward to today and and we've backed four Spanish companies in the last eighteen months.

• 18:21Speaker 02

  Um we did Packlink, uh uh Wallop, Fever, and now most recently Cato DB. Um and so we're we're hugely, it's not like we sat down, you know, a year ago and said, let's go back a bunch of Spanish companies. We just kept meeting these great.

• 18:36Harry Stebbings?

  You want to hold it in.

• 18:37Speaker 02

  I know, yeah, it does definitely has upsides to it. But we, you know, we just uh we just kept meeting great founders. Uh and it was kind of videosyncratic and uh and now we find ourselves being, you know, being very heavy investors down there. But but I think a a lot of it comes down to the recession really hit Spain hard. You know, there were these two Achilles heels in the Spanish uh tech ecosystem um originally. It was, you know, this sort of this fear of failure. And this massive bureaucracy and red tape that's stopping companies being started. And I think nowadays, you know, when a recession hits that bad and and people don't have that as much to lose. You get this new generation of Spanish entrepreneurs coming through that sort of don't give a damn about these these these sort of traditional um uh roadblocks.

• 19:20Speaker 02

  And just want to get out there and start great companies. And and it's also, you know, it's also much more globally oriented than we'd seen before. I mean, we used to see these companies who were uh focused on the local market or at best doing something for the Latin American market. And now we're seeing companies like Wallop, uh which is, you know, uh attacking a massive global opportunity of mobile. Classifieds can be can be a huge global business. Um, and trying their model out in Spain and and as soon as they know it's working, really taking it global. You know, they're now in US, UK, Mexico, France, and and they're going like bananas. Uh, they're exactly the sort of entrepreneurs that we want to back. It doesn't matter where they are, really. Spain just happens to be where we've been finding them.

• 19:59Harry Stebbings?

  I always think communities can be a bit of a chicken and egg problem in terms of startups to VC funding. And quite a lot of people give me different answers on this one. Why do you say in terms of what comes first, the startups and the VCs follow? Or if VCs are there, will startups move to be closer to them?

• 20:16Speaker 02

  Yeah, I mean, I think VC money does flow naturally across borders. I mean, just look at where we invest. We'll come anywhere. We'll go out of our way to find companies. Um, I mean, we we invested uh in a company called Catowiki uh recently, which is. Uh, which is a Dutch company, but it's not in, it's not in Amsterdam. It's in this tiny little town, which is, I think there's sixty thousand people there. You know, we we, you know.

• 20:38Harry Stebbings?

  It's a new tech hub.

• 20:39Speaker 02

  It's exactly, um, and and New Zealand is another great example, you know, so, you know, we out, the the sort of cash does flow. Uh, and and I think companies almost by definition have to um uh start somewhere. Um, and so I think those ecosystems tend to, the VC money will flow into where the the great founders and starting companies.

• 20:59Harry Stebbings?

  And if it's good with you, we're gonna move into a a quick fire round now. Do I say, sure, yeah?

• 21:04Speaker 02

  Sure.

• 21:04Harry Stebbings?

  Let's go for it. So your favorite book, uh, and why?

• 21:08Speaker 02

  I I I read a lot of history books. I I think I've been living in London for like six years now, and I've only just started reading a bunch of history books on London.

• 21:15Harry Stebbings?

  Okay.

• 21:15Speaker 02

  Peter Ackroyd's got a great one, um, and I it it bores the hell out of my wife. Cause we we just walk around London these days and I'd point out where so and so's happened or such and such thing. Uh, but on the business side, you know, I'm a sucker for the classics, um, you know, Crossing the Chasm, uh, more, I think, you know, I think there's. Everything you ever need to learn about uh uh scaling an enterprise software company is in that book. It's great.

• 21:38Harry Stebbings?

  Absolutely. And then how do you measure your success as a VC?

• 21:42Speaker 02

  So I guess, you know, you know, the obvious answer is return to your LPs, but I think that's such a. Uh, a a long-term measure of success that you can drive yourself crazy if you didn't have something to to measure yourself against in the. Over the the the shorter period of time.

• 21:56Harry Stebbings?

  Do you find that longevity of kind of return in how well you're doing tough?

• 22:01Speaker 02

  Uh, well, it's it's it's the ultimately long feedback loop, right? It's it's so it's so if you're measuring yourself against that, you're not really gonna know how you're doing for many, many years. Um, so I think, you know, in in the interim, I think, you know, the the measures of success, at least that that I use are things like, you know, am I, you know, uh, am I getting to uh the chance to work with founders that I think are doing really fantastic things and that uh, and with companies I think are genuine game changers? Uh, and and, you know, on a personal note, am I enjoying working with these people and these founders? Um, you know, and not just in the good times, because everyone's had a great time when things are going well in a company, but also when things are going badly. You know, is am I still, you know, having a good time interacting with them? If I still take them out for a beer, et cetera, is there still a good relationship?

• 22:46Speaker 02

  And I think that's a great measure of success.

• 22:48Harry Stebbings?

  And then what have you learned recently that's that's changed the way you see investing or startups? Or how you kind of operate?

• 22:55Speaker 02

  Yeah, well, yeah, you know, I I I always think of myself very much as a sponge. I'm still very much in learning mode when it comes to everything with VC and you're learning stuff every day. Um, I think one one thing I've learned, you know, is is this is one of the one of the best things about VC, and sometimes actually one of the worst things, is that you are constantly thinking about new things. Every half hour, every hour, you're thinking about a new company or a new trend or meeting new people, et cetera, and you're constantly bouncing. It's like institutionalized ADD, um.

• 23:24Harry Stebbings?

  It's one of the main reasons I'm so chaste.

• 23:27Speaker 02

  It is, it's fantastic, because you get to meet so many great people. Uh, but at the same time, you know, I think one thing I've re- learned recently, that you need to build yourself in time to sort of step back and take a a higher level view of things and try to identify areas and and and things that are that are really exciting. Um, and try to go deep in them from time to time, because you can spend your entire time doing tactical sort of block and tackling and uh, without actually ever standing back and saying, this is where I think the the future's gonna be in five years' time. What do I do, what do I need to do to align myself with that and find great companies who are uh buying into that same vision? And I and and, you know, there's a there's a lot to be done in sort of sitting down and having that quiet reflective part.

• 24:06Harry Stebbings?

  And then your favorite blog or newsletter?

• 24:09Speaker 02

  Uh, you know, I'm a bit of a dabbler, to be honest, like I just dump everything into my Feedly feed and it comes out and I read everything. So, uh, you know, I think, um, I've also been spending a lot of time on Medium lately, you know, that's and just bouncing from blog to blog, the discovery feature on that is phenomenal, right? You're just, it's such a time step.

• 24:26Harry Stebbings?

  Well, it's a matter of classic kind of, uh, liking.

• 24:29Speaker 02

  Exactly, it's amazing, I spend so much time on that, but I should probably give a shout out to one of my favourites here, which is one of my colleagues, Adrian Colyer, who's a venture partner here. He writes a great blog on a daily basis, I don't know how he does it, um, called The Morning Paper. And he takes, um, he takes sort of an academic paper in computer science and basically translates it in a way that just makes it very easyable and very approachable in layman's terms. And it's a great one to totally geek out on.

• 24:57Harry Stebbings?

  And then which investor or founder do you most respect or admire in the industry? Is there one?

• 25:04Speaker 02

  I think, I think recently, I mean, you can't really look past, uh, Will Shue over at Deliveroo. I mean, the guy could get anything off the ground. I think it's just a level of ambition and sheer bloody mindedness that makes you want to back him no matter what company. He could come in with Facebook for dogs and I think we'd probably have backed him.

• 25:21Harry Stebbings?

  Um, and then your most recent investment and why you said yes?

• 25:26Speaker 02

  Uh, the last one we announced was, uh, was Dr. Lib, which is a French, uh, uh, doctor appointment booking system. Uh, and to be honest, it was easy, it was a great team, uh, great market, um, uh, good momentum. Uh, and the vision, the vision was great, it was, uh, you know, uh, using digital health to bring access to, to better healthcare.

• 25:46Harry Stebbings?

  Well, James, thank you so much for joining me on the show today and for welcoming me into your offices. It's very, very kind of you.

• 25:51Speaker 02

  Absolute pleasure.

• 25:52Harry Stebbings?

  And again, I'd like to say a huge thank you to James for giving up his time today to be on the show. And if you're loving the 20 Minute VC, sign up to our newsletter on the20minutavec.com, all in letters. So you never have to miss an episode. As always, it's been such a huge pleasure bringing you today's show. And you can send all your thoughts, feedback and suggestions to [email protected]. Would absolutely love to hear from you and welcome all suggestions. Thanks so much and stay tuned for our Founder's Friday episode with the incredible James Bishara, co-founder at A16Z-backed Tilt, uh, one of the most exciting prospects in crowdfunding. So stay tuned and we look forward to bringing that to you on Friday.